


the desert inside

by venndaai



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Adoribull Reverse Big Bang 2019, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Minor Character Death, Post-Game(s), Pre-Dragon Age: Inquisition - Trespasser DLC, Sera/Cadash - Freeform, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-15
Updated: 2020-01-16
Packaged: 2021-02-27 10:46:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 11,486
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22265842
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/venndaai/pseuds/venndaai
Summary: In the Hissing Wastes, far from Tevinter, Dorian comes face to face with his past and his future. The Bull is a source of both comfort and confusion.
Relationships: Dorian Pavus & Maevaris Tilani, Iron Bull/Dorian Pavus, Thorold Tethras/Maevaris Tilani
Comments: 16
Kudos: 88
Collections: Actually Adoribull Fic, The Collected Fanfics for the Adoribull Reverse Bang 2019





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Essential Comforts](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/550969) by dies_dandles. 



Dorian had thought the Hissing Wastes an unsettlingly quiet wilderness. In the early morning, though, with the sand glowing red and the air cool and crisp, the Wastes seemed to come alive. He heard the tiny witterings of a hundred little birds, and saw them, occasionally. Little dark spots that perched on the dry and twisted husks that called themselves trees out here, or hid under the shiny leaves of dragonthorn. Lizards, too, darted between patches of shade. 

“It almost seems hospitable,” he commented. 

“It’ll be scorching in a couple of hours,” Cadash said. “Keep an eye out for that spring Harding marked on the map.” She patted the pack mule she was leading, and it blew air out its nose at her. 

Dorian heard Sera mutter something about sand in her undergarments. Perhaps a less melodious sound than birdsong, he thought, but it brought a similar warmth to the desolate landscape. 

A shadow fell over the sand. At this hour, the Bull’s shadow was endless, like a rivulet of water darkening the thirsty ground. 

“Your delicate footsies doing all right there, big guy?”

The sudden warmth he felt was, Dorian was sure, entirely to do with the rising sun at his back. Even if the great oaf was blocking the sunlight right now. “They’re fine, thank you so much for the concern,” he said. 

“Still think those slippers of yours are gonna fall apart on you.”

“At least I don’t look like I’ve tied some flour sacks onto the ends of my legs.” 

The orange of the sand dunes at dawn reminded him of the awnings in Minrathous’s Grand Market, but at that moment Dorian didn’t feel homesick at all.

“Here,” the Bull said, and it took Dorian a moment to realize he was speaking to Cadash. “That’s the gap in the cliffs. The spring is in there.”

  
  


They pitched their tents in that orange ember-glowing light, and took care of various small but necessary tasks during the still-cool hours of early morning. Those were good hours, sitting cross-legged inside the tent repairing frayed leather straps, remixing potions, removing the kohl from around his eyes, while outside he could hear the comforting music of Sera fletching arrows and singing a very profane nonsense song. Cadash sharpening a dulled blade. The Bull, doing a hundred different little things. Sometimes cooking, as he was the only one of their little band who knew how. 

“It must seem very stupid to you,” Dorian said, when the Bull at last came into the tent and took off his boots. Dorian had his hand mirror out, and was scrubbing the liner from his eyes with careful strokes of a wet cloth. “Me putting this concoction on every evening, out here in the middle of nowhere, with no one to even see it.”

“I see it,” the Bull said, kissing the back of Dorian’s neck. “I like it.”

Dorian was still not accustomed to this. He felt himself flush, and snapped his cosmetics case closed. 

They slept then. Sleeping through midday heat was at least familiar to Dorian. It had taken weeks to break himself of the habit, when he had first come south. But midday in the Wastes felt hotter than any Minrathous summer. He lay on top of a thin bedroll, the fabric of the tent glowing orange in the sun, and dozed, aware of the Bull’s bulk beside him, of a giant hand that occasionally ran its three fingers through Dorian’s sweat-soaked hair, like the Bull was waking to check that Dorian was still in arms reach. 

It worried him, the tenderness of that little motion, in ways he didn’t want to name, and he pressed his face into the bare skin of his forearm and slipped back into sleep to avoid thinking about it. 

Then in the evening they woke, and packed up the tents, and began to walk again. Dorian listened as the birds started up their singing. It lasted less than an hour before silence came again. The most beautiful things were so often the briefest. 

Dorian’s experience with deserts was limited. Qarinus was a damp, warm place, always moist with the mists off the Nocen Sea. Carastes was much the same. Minrathous was dry and sunny in the summer, the harsh light bouncing off marble only making the shadows deeper, but miserably cold and wet in the winter. Or so Dorian had thought, before he’d come south, and learned what cold and wet truly meant. 

On that desperate, ill-conceived journey, he’d passed through the deserts of central Tevinter. Desolate places, inhabited only by dying runaways and deserters, and those who hunted them. Dorian, traveling by night from highway town to highway town, birthright hidden against his skin, had thought of the wastelands only as a metaphor for the desolation inside of him. 

The Hissing Wastes laughed at any such attempt to compress them down to human scale. Their vastness boggled the mind and made the soul quail to contemplate it. 

During the day, the heat of the harsh sun was entirely unbearable, and so the Inquisitor’s little band travelled at night, stumbling over the spines of dunes, picking their way around clumps of witherstalk by the distant impersonal light of the moons. In the evening the walk was pleasant, and in the early morning as well. In between it felt as cold as the Emprise, though Dorian had yet to see any snow. Perhaps it felt colder than it actually was, because the sands were so vast and empty, and the moonlight so chilled. Dorian wondered if his companions also felt the alienation of their surroundings. Sera’s complaints sounded much the same as always. Cadash was gruff, and much preoccupied with noting the locations of old ruins in interchangeable Inquisition notebooks. The Iron Bull was comfortingly unchangeable, his huge silly axe hoisted over one shoulder, moonlight glinting in his eye as he commented on signs of Venatori movement, or teasingly flirted with Dorian.

Ridiculous, the way those silly comments made Dorian’s heart race. 

Absurd, the way he kept turning to look at the Bull’s silhouette outlined by the starriest night he’d ever known. He was used to the Bull being huge, crowding up a room, blocking out the landscape behind him.

In the Wastes, for the first time, the Bull seemed small. He took point, always, and Dorian needed only walk a little too fast for a moment and he would turn and see a sloping dune between them, and the Bull seemed to be vanishing into the endless sand, the swallowing bowl of the southern stars.

If Dorian’s feet slowed, it was only due to the sand getting in his boots. 

He did not wish to in any way delay the group. He was grateful they were going after the fleeing Venatori at all. Cadash might have decided they were harmless with their leader and his armies vanquished, and let them scurry back to Tevinter. Dorian knew all too well that they were not harmless, and apparently the Inquisition agreed.

Cadash had her map, which she seemed to pause to update about every five feet, and it had marked on it the Inquisition scouts’ best guesses at Venatori positions; but those turned out to be so inaccurate as to almost be worse than useless. They stumbled across the Venatori camp, warned only by the flicker of a campfire, and then, less pleasantly, the bodies of dead slaves, left for scavengers. Sera reacted particularly badly to the second, going what Dorian could only describe as “full berserker,” leaving him scrambling to get a barrier on her as she launched herself at the enemy. He couldn’t imagine how she’d ever managed to survive on her own.

That wasn’t something he wanted to think about, either. 

The fighting itself felt better than he wanted to admit. He’d always been competitive, and the most fun he’d had during his Circle education was when the apprentices had been allowed to duel. As an adult, duelling had gradually lost its thrill; but fighting for his life was the new upgraded version. It was the perfect opportunity to show off his skill and power, and definitively prove that he was better than his enemy. It was satisfying. 

There was more to it than that, he knew, but he didn’t examine it. They were a long way from Skyhold’s Chantry, and he’d take whatever pleasure got him through the day, and deal with any stains on his soul at a later date. 

He remembered the first time he’d fought Venatori- when he’d accidentally stumbled onto a camp of them, in his flight south, and been recognized. The altus mage in charge of the camp had been vaguely familiar, and he’d called out Dorian’s name, and then called him _proditor_ , and sent ice spikes flying at his face. It still bothered Dorian, more than he’d like to admit, that he didn’t know if Gereon had ordered his death, or if the mage had taken that initiative on his own. The fight had been brutal. He’d been surprised and alone, but he’d been full of rage, too, and it had never been so easy to tear the veil and summon spirits across. 

He remembered the first time the Inquisitor had fought Venatori. In Redcliffe Castle, up to their knees in dirty, red-tinged water, Cadash had stared down at the fallen bodies of their foes and asked, “What kind of fucking idiots fight for someone trying to destroy the world?”

“Slaves, probably,” Dorian had said, and hadn’t even really heard himself until he saw the expression on Cadash’s face. 

They were going to die anyway, that was what Dorian told himself. To the Venatori their slaves were just meat, to be thrown at the Inquisition or bled once the lyrium ran out. Dorian couldn’t pretend the death he brought was merciful, but at least it was swift. 

He could feel his latest barrier attenuating as an arrow glanced off of it, but it wasn’t gone yet, and he had to spend his mana on igniting a stalker creeping up on Sera, and hope that the barrier would hold until he could catch his breath. In the center of the camp, Cadash had actually jumped on a big armored brute of a slave, one arm around his throat as she forced her dagger through a chink in the armor. She glittered with ice crystals from the flask she’d thrown over herself, and as they evaporated under the heat of a fireball, the air around her filled with mist. Behind her, at the other end of the camp, the dark-robed mage who had sent the fireball lifted his staff, and Dorian felt the fabric of reality shift. 

“Demon,” he shouted, and jumped forward, twisting to face the thing coalescing at his back. It had at least four arms, and spines burst from its pale and lumpy skin. It reached for him- ah, he’d miscounted, it had at least six arms- and Dorian stepped backwards again, trying to reach for fire, for lightning, for a spirit he could bend to his own will. There was nothing. His mana was dry. The clawed hands scrabbled at his barrier, and it peeled away like the skin of an orange. He reached for the lyrium potion at his belt, knowing he wouldn’t get it in time. The moon was in his eyes, and his throat was dry, the air in his lungs cold. 

The Bull’s axe arced into the thing in a wave of dawnstone and dust and ichor. The single axe blow had cut the demon almost in half, but its claws still leaped up and dug gorges into the Bull’s chest and stomach and legs. Hot dark blood hit the sand. Dorian could sense it, could feel the power in it humming. Calling. 

The greataxe drove into the demon’s spindly body again and again, and Dorian took a breath, and turned back to the mage, and focused on dispelling the man’s attempts to summon another spirit, while Sera’s arrows split apart his barrier, and Cadash’s daggers found his throat. The camp was suddenly quiet, at least on the physical side of the Veil. 

Dorian turned back around again. The Bull was standing slightly hunched, hands on his knees, his axe on the ground. Dorian could hear him taking deep breaths, air going in and out of those huge lungs like a bellows. 

The memory of the demon’s claws slicing through flesh was still vividly fresh. He still wasn’t quite used to the way the Bull just did that kind of thing. Dorian liked to think he was the kind of man who’d put himself between innocents and those who would harm them, of course, but when he thought about a category of people where he’d instantly fling himself into the path of oncoming pain… it was a short list. His father, still, unfortunately. Two people who were dead now, who he’d never had the opportunity to protect, and one who might as well be dead. Cadash, he supposed, because while he could probably come up with an easy way to close the remaining rifts without the mark, given enough time, funds, and generous lab space, who had the patience for that? Who else. Sera, who cursed up a storm when she so much as stubbed a toe. They often fought back to back, perched on the highest vantage point they could find; if he saw an arrow aimed at her, he might dramatically place himself in its way, in the unlikely situation he had no other way to shift its course. 

Not a long list, as previously stated.

But the Bull threw his own body directly onto enemy blades, if they even started to move towards his allies. At this point, the sight of the man’s blood was as familiar to Dorian as the bitter taste of lyrium or the thudding sound of arrows. 

“Bull,” Dorian said, taking a hesitant step forward. The Bull shook his head, and raised a warning hand. They’d fought together enough now that Dorian knew that meant the Bull’s wounds weren’t dangerous, but he needed a minute alone to come down from the place the blood rage sent him. Dorian could respect that. He pulled the half-full vial of elfroot extract from his belt and placed it on the ground, just in case, and then he headed across the camp that had become a battlefield. The dead lay on the ground, fallen in contorted positions that did not mimic sleep. Each body was still warm with the energy of recently departed life, energy that he could draw, if he wished. Across the paper thinness of the Veil, he could hear the whisper of spirits that longed to inhabit those bodies, and could have what they desired in a moment, if he extended a helping hand to them. He did neither thing. He was no Mortalitasi, and this was not the Grand Necropolis. 

The dead mage lay sprawled on the ground, and up close Dorian could see immediately that he had been Altus, from the quality of his clothes. The Venatori had a uniform only in the sense that they had a strict color scheme and slapped that fucking dragon emblem onto everything. This one might well have ordered a custom made set of robes from the same Minrathous tailor Dorian himself had once patronized.

The man’s face wasn’t one he recognized, but its features were vaguely familiar. He thought he could probably guess which ancient and noble family had just lost one of its scions. 

Cadash joined him, where he stood observing the corpse, and the dwarf unceremoniously knelt down and began going through the man’s pockets. Their fearless leader was never squeamish about scavenging battlefields like a carrion bird. He supposed it came of a Carta background. He’d never had any dealings with the Carta personally, back home, but he was always aware that someone had, somewhere along the supply chain that lead to the elegant blue bottles of liquid lyrium sold by Tevinter’s Circles. Carta dwarves often made cameo appearances in popular entertainments as the dumb muscle. Cadash wasn’t dumb, but she was certainly muscular, Dorian mused, before his train of thought was totally derailed by the sight of Cadash lifting up a chain around the dead man’s neck, and at the end of it, a silver pendant. It was a round, somewhat tarnished pendant, with a symbol embossed on its flattened surface, and in the center was an orange gem, like a malevolent eye. Dorian had seen this pendant before, but the context had been so utterly different that he could only stare, bemused, as his mind tried to fit memory to present. 

“You recognize this?” Cadash said, and yanked the chain from the dead man’s neck, breaking it with a sharp snap, and then tossed the pendant to Dorian. He nearly didn’t catch it. His hands felt slow and too large. 

“Hey,” a voice rumbled, from behind and above his shoulder. Dorian sighed, and let himself lean slightly backward. His weight shifting to the balls of his feet. Not enough to fall, but he wouldn’t have fallen, anyway, because a great warm hand was cupping the base of his skull. A thumb rubbed gently at his jawbone. 

“You alright?” the Bull asked. 

Dorian fixed a smile on his face, and tucked the pendant into one of the pouches on his belt. “Fine,” he said. And to Cadash, still waiting, looking at him with beetling brows furrowed, he added, “It’s not a Venatori symbol. It’s a military medal. Given out for distinguished service. I’ve seen them a few times before, but this particular type is quite rare.”

“Huh,” Cadash said, looking uninterested. A year and a half of what Dorian had recently begun to admit was genuine friendship, and Dorian still couldn’t understand her, most of the time. She could get obsessed over the oddest things- the layout of dwarven ruins under the sands, the shards of ancient magic hidden all over the South, bits and pieces of mosaics. But anything about modern human societies bored her. 

“So this guy was a war hero?” the Bull asked. He, on the other hand, approached almost everything with the same calm yet alert tone; the sense of information being tidily filed away. It was more clinical than Dorian wanted, right now. He didn’t know what he wanted instead. Something like anger was aching in his skull, itching to be expressed in flames and nightmares. As always, long training responded automatically, and he breathed long and deep, letting the feeling seep into the cracked desert ground. 

_Any mage who lets himself be ruled by emotion, Dorian, has already lost everything_. 

The pendant felt heavy, in the pouch at his belt, but he knew he was only imagining things.

“Done yet?” Sera asked sharply. “Can we be going now?” There was a sharpness to her, like a sack full of broken glass, and Dorian winced away from it. He could do the _concern_ part of friendship, or at least, the skies had not yet fallen as a result of him attempting it. He could not imagine himself soothing another’s pain. 

There were things he could say, perhaps. “Sorry my countrymen are ogres in the shapes of men?” He’d be just as likely to fan the flames of her anger rather than soothing it. A year and a half, and it was still regularly made clear to him that he was tolerated in spite of his level of skill at saying the right thing, not because of it. 

Cadash had an unrolled parchment in her hands, with an official-looking stamp in the upper right corner. Venatori orders. “Yes,” she said, “we’ve got what we need, let’s move on.”

  
  


They set up camp that morning in the lee of an ancient statue. A great carved head, belonging to some ancient dwarven king, staring out across the unbroken sands with an expression of bearded sorrow. When Cadash opened and shared around a bottle of some vile spirit, Dorian toasted the statue, and tossed back his tiny cupful of alcohol. “If envy demons could piss, this is what it would taste like,” he declared, and poured himself another.

Inside the tent, he took the pendant out of its pouch, and stared at it, until he heard footsteps outside and shoved it away again. The tent flap was pushed back by a great gray hand. 

“Good, you’re here,” Dorian said. “I hope you understand why I set this tent up on the other side of that ugly statue from the other one.”

“So it’d be a little harder to overhear Sera’s dirty talk?” the Bull said, grinning, but he started undoing the drawstring on his terrible trousers. 

“Ugh,” Dorian said. “That too. I am happy for her and our leader, but there are few sounds more libido-killing.” 

“And so Sera doesn’t hear you and mock you for it for hours tomorrow.”

“That was the primary motivating factor, yes. Although I resent the implication that I will be making the majority of the noises.”

“Oh,” Bull said, the tone of his voice shifting, “you think you can be quiet?” He sat on the bedroll next to Dorian, no longer tiny in the vastness of the desert but huge in the closeness of the tent. The scratches on his chest were already thickly scabbed over, which was a little disgusting but not, if Dorian was honest, detracting. Dorian reached over and lifted up the battered leather eyepatch, letting it dangle from one horn. He kissed the Bull’s brow, his cheek, and then his mouth.

“I can be _disciplined_ ,” Dorian said. “Silence would be a waste. I’m so very good at talking.”

“Yeah, I know all about how you like to be disciplined,” the Bull said. 

“Ugh. You, on the other hand, are not talented at talking. Shut up and distract me.”

And there it was. Bit of a subconscious slip there. That was what he wanted. To stop being so fucking aware of the pendant hidden away in its leather pouch. Perhaps it was selfish of him, to use the Bull so blatantly. Perhaps when one was- whatever they were- intercourse ought to always be an expression of intimacy and trust and- whatever. How should he know? And perhaps he felt guilty for a moment, but he looked up at the Bull, at the dark crags of his face softened in the dark of the tent, and saw the Bull pause, considering him, with a look of such measured understanding it was impossible to believe the Bull didn’t know exactly what was behind Dorian’s desires. 

It could be more than a little infuriating, that air of confident omniscience, but if it got Dorian fucked faster, he was all for it. 

“Got it,” the Bull said, and slipped his huge hands under Dorian’s thighs. 

In the end he didn’t quite keep his implicit promise to stay at a low volume, because halfway through the Bull developed situational deafness and forced Dorian to shout “harder, harder, you imbecilic, cow-brained bastard” increasingly louder and louder, but any potential jibes from Sera would, Dorian thought, be worth it. 

Afterward Dorian laid on his back on his bedroll, comfortably sore, his head pillowed by one of those giant hands. The Bull was going to have terrible pins and needles in his arm if he didn’t move it soon, but he didn’t seem concerned, fingers flexing a little to move soothingly on Dorian’s scalp. Dorian stared at the thick canvas of the tent above him, and closed his eyes. The orange light was still there behind his eyelids. 

  
  


This was the memory of the last time he’d seen the pendant: afternoon sunlight, the hazy kind you got in Minrathous in the late summer, pouring in through the first floor windows of the Tilani estate. No street sounds of carts, shouting, or hoofbeats, just birdsong. The estate was miles outside the city, and insulated by impressive gardens. Dorian wished the birds would pipe down a little. He was lying on a long couch, an arm draped over his face, nursing a truly awful hangover. 

“Note to self,” he muttered, “never get into a drinking contest with a dwarf.”

It was tempting to blame everything about his current situation on Thorold Tethras. Magister Tilani’s dwarven lover only visited Minrathous once a month; why had he had to do so during the week Dorian happened to be abusing Maevaris’s hospitality? And surely there had been malicious intent behind his presentation of three bottles of finest dwarven wine, apparently made from hallucinogenic Deep Mushrooms. And his jokes about the comparative alcohol tolerances of dwarves and humans had clearly been goads designed to inflame Dorian’s pride, even if Maevaris had believed them to be attempts at changing the topic from her political doomsaying. 

Such reasoning was preferable to the truth, which was that Dorian had drunk too much to dampen his feelings of awkwardness, his guilt at imposing upon his friends, and the sour jealousy that twisted in his stomach when he saw Thorold and Maevaris shower each other with open, honest affection. And also he’d drunk too much because drinking too much was what he did, these days. 

_I wonder what Gereon would think of me now,_ Dorian pondered, but the thought hurt and he dropped it quickly.

Maevaris would kick him out of her house eventually, he was sure- his presence here was surely doing her no political favors- but he thought his own shame would probably drive him away long before then. Maybe he’d leave today. As soon as he started feeling a little less like death warmed over. 

When he heard the atrium door opening, Dorian considered leaving his eyes closed. But curiosity won out over pain, and he squinted at the doorway, raising his head by a tiny angle. One of Magister Tilani’s dwarven house servants- servants, not slaves, he’d been told, because Magister Tilani delighted in being different- was ushering three humans into the large, luxuriously furnished room. “Master Tethras is upstairs,” the dwarven butler told the best-dressed human. “I will inform him of your arrival immediately.”

“Thank you,” the human replied. He was the most generic in appearance of the three, as far as Dorian could tell with one squinted eye’s vision. The woman was very tall and broad and was wearing a sword belted on her hip, which struck Dorian as odd. The man who hadn’t spoken was short, though not short enough to be mistaken for a dwarf. The three of them could have been a slapstick circus act, except that all of them were draped in black silk and jewelry and other such signs of enslavement to the terrible trends of altus fashion. 

The butler bowed, and disappeared up the main staircase. Dorian considered the pros and cons of trying to get up and introduce himself, trying to get up and slink out of the room, or just lying there and hoping nobody noticed him. The option that didn’t involve movement won, because his head was throbbing again. 

_Dear Felix,_ Dorian composed in his head, _how are you? If it makes you feel any better, I’m doing terribly. I have a feeling today’s the day I am finally ejected from the last house in this city that still tolerates me. Yesterday morning, a servant with a very enormous beard brought me a letter from my father. I don’t know what it said, as I incinerated it immediately; unfortunately the impressive beard was still in the vicinity, and caught on fire as well. I doused the flames with a bottle of Red Shear 8:93. Subpar vintage, so no great loss there. The man was a good sport about it, but I think I should leave before Maevaris has to throw me out. How’s_ your _father? Has he slept at all, since I left?_

Dorian closed his eyes.

A heavy tread on the stairs. “Hello,” boomed Thorold’s voice. “Sorry to keep you waiting. My wife wasn’t expecting visitors today.” 

“That’s all right,” said the man who hadn’t spoken before, the short one, and Dorian froze in the middle of trying to quietly roll over. “We’re actually interested in speaking to you.”

He knew that voice. And when he managed to focus his eyes, peering over a cushion, on the visitors, he knew that jawline, too. Though he was more familiar with it from a different angle. 

The pendant that hung around the man’s neck- around all three of those necks, actually- erased any faint hope that this might be only a stranger bearing a strong resemblance to the man who had sucked Dorian’s cock at a Satinalia party ten weeks previously. 

New plan. Hold as absolutely still as a statue until they all left the room, and then fling himself out the nearest window and run for the hills. 

He didn’t even know the man’s name, and he liked to think that was what his father would be most disappointed about. Ignorance was dangerous. Nowhere was that more true than in Minrathous, where letting things slip meant assassins in your bath. But Dorian had been slipping. Perhaps because he didn’t much care about his own safety any more. Perhaps- and this was much worse- because deep down he still trusted in his father’s deft political maneuvering, and he trusted that no matter how much he tarnished the family name, his father would never remove that protection. 

Perhaps the thing he should actually do was get smoothly to his feet and walk over to introduce himself, heedless of his wine-stained bathrobe and smudged face, pretending they were all perfect strangers to him. Perhaps that was what a braver man would have done. 

Dorian held his breath and listened to his heart pound in his ears until he heard Thorold say, “Of course. My office is upstairs. Come this way.” 

He waited only until the sound of footsteps stopped, and then he rolled himself upright and ran for the atrium entrance, abandoning the belongings he’d left scattered around Maevaris’s home. He barely noticed the servants who watched him as he passed through the perfectly pruned gardens and past the main gate into the quiet suburban street. 

He didn’t know then that it would be the last time he’d ever see Thorold Tethras alive. 

  
  


When Dorian awoke in the tent it was nearly dark. He sat up. All his belongings were neatly packed, but the leather pouch was still close to his hand. The tent was empty. He could hear distant swearing in a distinctly Fereldan accent, though, so his companions hadn’t mysteriously vanished while he slept. 

When he staggered out of the tent, he heard the argument before he saw it. Sera and Cadash were yelling at each other. Dorian felt himself starting to get a headache. Cadash’s temper was slow to rouse, but once it was awake it could rage for hours. On the ground between the two women was a pile of smashed glass and a pool of multicolored liquid. Oops. Looked like there had been an alchemical accident. 

“It was an accident, Sera,” Cadash was saying stridently. 

“And that makes it fine, yeah? Next time we get in a fight with the Vennytors, I’ll just tell them sorry, was gonna stab you with my fire knife but my clumsy girlfriend dropped all my bottles?”

“They’re _our_ bottles,” Cadash said. 

“Andraste preserve us,” Dorian muttered under his breath. Where was the Bull? Dorian wanted, in this moment, to not be the only person suffering. He looked around, but it was rather later in the evening than they had been waking, and it was hard to see in the darkening dusk. 

Then, movement; a gray hand, the same tone as the now gray sand behind it, invisible until it waved at him. Blurred shadows resolved into the shape of a Qunari in the process of packing up the tent Dorian hadn’t just stumbled out of.

Dorian picked his way over the sand. To his right he heard Sera shout, “Fine then!”

“Fine!” Cadash shouted back, just as loud. 

“Hey,” the Bull said, when Dorian came within range of a quiet murmur. Not that even the Bull’s quietest murmur would ever really count as quiet. The man’s voice was almost as big as he was. 

“Lovely evening, isn’t it?” Dorian said. “How sweetly the desert larks are singing.”

The Bull tilted his head slightly in the direction of the screaming lovebirds. “Yeah,” he said. “Sera’s still not feeling great about those bodies we found. If she was thinking straight, she wouldn’t be taking it out on the boss, but she can’t think straight, not right now.” He put down the tent pole he was holding, and picked up something on the ground; when he brought the object up Dorian saw it was a mug of tea. Made, from the smell of it, with exactly the correct temperature of water, heated by old-fashioned, unmagical methods. 

Dorian took it, and inhaled the steam. “Did Sera confide in you?”

The Bull shrugged, the blur of the steam turning him into a wavering mass of grays again. “Didn’t have to.”

“Mind reading is a terribly useful skill,” Dorian said. “Not sure why you’re telling me these fruits of your telepathic powers, and not Cadash.”

“Because I want you to tell her,” the Bull said. The steam was dissipating a bit as the tea cooled. He could see the Bull grin. 

“For Andraste’s sake, Bull,” Dorian said, “why?”

“I just do,” the Bull said. Damn the ox-man and his irritating smugness. “And if you don’t, you’ll have to listen to them barking at each other all the way to the next landmark.”

“Ugh,” Dorian said, and sat down to drink his tea, while the Bull returned to stowing the tent poles in their fabric bag and folding up the tent itself. 

The tea tasted perfect. Dorian had never been able to catch the Bull making it wrong. He’d watched Dorian do it, once, and then he’d just started making it for him. A perfect mimic. And it was just for him, though the same kettle of water, once cooled a bit, could be used to make what the Southerners called ‘tea’, and the Bull did that too, for Sera and Cadash. But Dorian had woken up many times now in the Bull’s room at Skyhold, with the smell of freshly brewed tea in his nostrils. 

Dorian didn’t know what Qunari drank on Par Vollen, and even if he had known he wouldn’t have been able to get up before the Bull to make anything. The early morning was an undiscovered country known only to those with large muscles and obnoxiously cheerful dispositions. 

And also, he supposed, to those travelling through the desert. 

  
  


As the night went on, the air grew colder and colder. Dorian missed his tea. He drew mana into his hands, warming them with the slightest bit of heat, but that did nothing for his ears and toes. Sera scouted ahead, clearly wanting some alone time, which Dorian was glad to give to her. A few hours into their walking Dorian sighed and approached Cadash, who was again leading the pack mule. 

“She’s not really angry at you, you know,” Dorian said. 

Cadash raised an eyebrow at him. “That’s certainly what I’ve been telling myself,” she said. “But coming from you, I almost believe it.”

“I’m flattered,” Dorian said.

“Well, you never care enough to pay attention to what’s going on with people, so if you’ve noticed, it really must be obvious.”

“Ah,” Dorian said. “Happy to be of service.”

His footsteps must have slowed, because he found himself falling back, next to the Bull, who laughed at him, a soundless chuckle in the moonlight. “Shut up,” he muttered. 

There was a soft sound above them, and then Sera was there, almost seeming to materialize out of the darkness. “Fire up ahead,” she said quietly, all business, which for Sera meant all rage, like an elf-shaped arrow taut on the string. “I think four. Three big bastards and a mage. Couldn’t see anyone in chains, or not holding weapons.”

Cadash was already tethering the mule to a tiny stunted tree. “All right,” she said, calmly. “Let’s do this.” 

The mage, it turned out, was a woman with a sword. This didn’t surprise Dorian. The fact that the sword was a Blade of Mercy, unfortunately, did. He barely managed to dodge to avoid his staff being shattered, and threw all his magic against her barrier while Cadash crept up and stabbed her in the ribs. 

“Good riddance to bad rubbish,” Sera said.

“Agreed,” said Dorian, and hated that his voice was somewhat unsteady. He could see the silver chain around the dead woman’s neck.

“Is that it?” the Bull asked. “We’re done?”

Cadash had found the woman’s pack, and was laying out everything in it. Dorian snatched up a sheet of parchment, and unrolled it, calling light to the end of his staff so he could read. It was a map, and there was a note written next to a marked spring. _Meet here. -Quintus._

“No,” Dorian said. “We’re not.”


	2. Chapter 2

He hadn’t known Thorold was dead until three days afterward, when a dwarven messenger had delivered a crisp and beautifully calligraphed funeral invitation to the house of ill repute where he’d ensconced himself. The message was short, and impersonal, and a sharp jolt to his system. The last funeral he’d gone to had been Livia Alexius’s. He’d had to buy a set of red silk finery for the event. He was grateful in a distant way to discover the clothes were buried at the bottom of one of his bags, that he’d packed them in his shameful flight from the Alexius’s manor, but the feeling was muffled under a vague, unspecified horror. 

The horror became specific when he arrived at Maevaris’s door and was greeted by the woman herself, the door flung open right before he could knock, leaving him off kilter and perfectly vulnerable to be shocked by Mae’s appearance. 

It was as though the last few months had been only a dream and he was still trapped in the terrible moment of returning from Minrathous and finding the only sanctuary of happiness he’d ever known transformed into a tomb. In Mae’s face he saw the same horror that had consumed Gereon Alexius. 

She looked so pale, in red. Like Felix had looked at Livia’s funeral.

Dorian took a step back, fully prepared to turn and flee, but Maevaris reached out and gripped his arm, her fingers like a steel vise, and said, “Please, my dear boy, come in.”

“Thank you,” Dorian said, and let himself be dragged inside. 

Once the door had closed, Maevaris had him up against the marble wall of the foyer, the blade of her staff cold and painful against his throat. “Tell me you had nothing to do with this,” she said. It would have been less frightening if she’d hissed the words, or screamed them. Instead, she sounded as calm and conversational as she had discussing Kal-Sharok tariffs over dinner four nights previously. 

Dorian didn’t dare speak for fear of cutting his own throat, but Mae must have read the truth in his eyes, because she nodded tightly, and took a step back, leaning her staff against the wall. 

“What happened?” Dorian asked, because if he truly was condemned to relive the past, he might as well speak his lines.

“He fell,” Maevaris said, her blue eyes very cold. “Down the stairs. Slipped on a spilled puddle of olive oil, it appears. Broke his neck. It was apparently perfectly painless.”

“Mae,” Dorian said, “I don’t know if it will help, but- I saw something.” 

It hadn’t helped much. Dorian didn’t know any of their names. Knowing that one of them was an altus and had been at Almadrius Solvarin’s Satinalia party wasn’t as useful as Dorian had hoped. The party hadn’t had a guest list- revelers were admitted based on the quality of a magical illusion they performed for Almadrius’s entertainment. Dorian vaguely remembered conjuring a tiny yet fierce dragon that had ended up setting Almadrius’s foyer on fire; the magister must have found it entertaining, because his only other memories of the night were of a lot of good alcohol and a drunken sexual encounter with a man in a swan mask, a man whose name he’d never asked for, who had later turned out to almost certainly be an assassin. 

“I asked Gerardan for a physical description, of course,” Maevaris said, “and the dear man did try his best, but he tells me us humans all look more or less the same to him. Also, I’m afraid he may be somewhat traumatized. Thorold’s people are-” She paused. “They were all very loyal to him.”

“And you?” Dorian asked, regretting it when she looked directly at him.

“What about me?” she asked.

“Are you doing all right, Maevaris?” he said.

Her white hands trembled around her wine glass. “Thorold is dead because of me,” she said. “I will never be all right.”

Dorian had begun to turn away when memory finally penetrated his haze of guilt. “He was wearing a pendant,” Dorian said. “A medallion. Here, let me-” He found chalk in a pocket, started sketching on a napkin.

“Hmm,” Maevaris said, looking his drawing over. “I would guess this is something military, judging by that dragon motif. I’ll look into it. Thank you, darling.”

It was several days after the funeral that Dorian received a letter. _Quintus Sebronius_ , it said, in Mae’s hand. _His family claims he is on an academic retreat in Tallo. I doubt it. He has been associating recently with certain radical factions. Do with this information what you wish. I will be pursuing my revenge upon his masters._

Dorian had done nothing with the information. By then he had been deep into his final attempt to drown despair with self destruction. 

When, a month later, he’d fled south, the memory had simply been part of everything he’d packed away in order to separate himself from Tevinter. Thorold Tethras was not even on the first page of things he was trying to forget. 

  
  


When they reached the spring marked on the map, there was no sign of any Venatori, or anyone at all. 

It was a pleasant spot. The spring fed a large pool, the mere sight of which made Dorian feel less parched and dusty, and cliffs enclosed a naturally defensive campsite. They searched the area, and then set up camp, for lack of any other leads.

“I’ll take third watch,” the Bull said. That was the one no one ever wanted.

“I’ll do fourth, then,” Dorian said. “You’ll wake me when you come to bed, anyway.”

The Bull nodded agreeably. 

“I’m going to sleep now,” Dorian said.

“I’ll be in in a bit,” the Bull said. “Think I might take a bath. You want to watch?”

“Too tired,” Dorian grumbled.

Dorian lay on his bedroll and fell asleep, and then he woke to bright daylight and and empty tent. He tried to roll over and go back to sleep, but sleep didn’t come. 

_Thorold is dead because of me._

Maevaris had been the one to open correspondence with him, after he’d joined the Inquisition. Before Felix’s death. Felix had approached her, she wrote to Dorian. One more unpayable debt Dorian owed. He was not sure he would have had the nerve to write to Maevaris uninvited. But she had not seemed to hold any grudge against him, and she spoke to him with the respect due a person of importance, not as one might write to an indolent acquaintance one knew best as a messy drunkard. 

They might be considered true friends, now. Allies, certainly. Lately, in her letters, Maevaris had begun to speak of _when you return._

In the undarkness of the tent in daylight, Dorian opened the pouch and let his fingers touch the cool metal of the pendant. 

After perhaps an hour, Dorian felt anger and frustration rising in him, and he stumbled out of the tent. The sun was setting, the air not as an oven, but it was warm. The birds were beginning their evening songs. The camp was still, and looked empty, except for the mule, asleep in the shadow of the rock. 

The thing about having a Qunari around was, it was very easy to tell when he wasn’t there. 

Dorian found a note, left under a rock, in the Bull’s neat, blocky handwriting. _Think I saw something south. Gone to look._

Dorian stared at it, bewildered. The Bull doing something so monumentally stupid and irresponsible as abandoning his watch- it more than made no sense. It was incomprehensible. 

He could see heavy footprints in the sand leading south, into a maze of box canyons. They were fresh, unsmoothed by the wind. He had a very strong urge to run after them, but that would make him as bad as the Bull. He strode over to the other tent. “Wake up,” he called sharply. Someone inside groaned and swore at him. “Bull’s missing,” he said. “I’m going to look for him.”

More swearing. He ignored it. They could do what they liked; he had fulfilled his duty by waking them. He grabbed his staff, and ran across the sand, into the canyons.

  
  


The canyon was winding, and narrow. After a few minutes, Dorian had no sense of how far the camp was behind him, or even which direction he was now pointing, since the sunset was hidden behind tall walls of rock. He opened his mouth to shout the Bull’s name, but something stopped him. Instincts he had learned to listen to, during his exile. He paused for a moment, trying to discern what it was that had alerted him. The canyon was very calm, the rock walls striated in beautiful shades of red, the air cool and comfortable and quiet.

The birds. He couldn’t hear any singing.

He started to run. His palms slapped against the porous rock as he pushed quickly around sharp turns in the wash. The sand underfoot shifted treacherously. He could hear his own heartbeat in his ears, now. 

He turned another bend and heard something, too faint to be identified, and much more clearly, felt the presence of spirits on the other side of the Veil, clustered around some hot spot of emotion. Violence. 

Death? 

He wasn’t sure. 

Had Maevaris felt this way? When she returned to a silent house, and sensed spirits come to feed on the feast of grief that would soon be available? No, she had had servants. They must have discovered the body, and sent for her. Someone had whispered in her ear, as she sat in the Senate, or chatted with a potential ally in a wineshop. She would have stood and made her apologies with brittle grace, even as inside she was fracturing to pieces.

Another turn. The sounds clarified into grunts, cries of pain, and then- silence. 

Dorian shoved himself out of the narrow canyon and onto a plain of bright, flaking white salt. Twisted forms of black rock rose at irregular intervals from the salt flat, one of them currently partially concealing Dorian from the human figure several hundred feet away.

Also several hundred feet away was a body, on the ground. A big, horned body. A fear demon sat on its chest, skittering limbs flexing. 

The standing man- the short, black-robed man- was saying something. Dorian focused, made the screaming in his head quiet. The man was saying, “Don’t try to get up.” 

Bull was alive.

Dorian began to gather the energies around him. Slowly, slowly, so the other mage wouldn’t notice. More agonizingly slowly than anything he’d ever done before in his life.

The Venatori mage took a step forward, was peering down at the Bull, poking him with the bladed end of his staff. He was saying, “Wait. I know you.”

Dorian watched the Bull. The Qunari’s head didn’t move. His mouth opened but his eyes remained closed. “Pretty sure you don’t,” Dorian heard the Bull grunt, in perfectly passable Tevene.

“The one-eyed Qunari mercenary… you must know you’re very memorable. So the Inquisition is buying your services now, are they? Funny, I wouldn’t have thought you were the Inquisitor’s type.” 

“Quintus,” Dorian said, limping around the edge of the rock, “kindly shut the fuck up.”

Not his most scintillating verbal flourish, he had to admit. But he wasn’t at his best. 

Quintus smiled at him. Dorian remembered that smile, even if he’d only previously seen it masked. It was a pleasant smile. Dorian had brushed his fingers over those lips. “Ah, Dorian of House Pavus. Are we on intimate terms now?”

“Run now,” Dorian said, “and you can live.” An obvious lie, and one Quintus could doubtless see straight through, but Dorian was discovering he would say anything to get that blade away from the Bull’s throat. _Fool_. 

“You’re very concerned with this creature’s health,” Quintus said. “Have your predilections evolved, in the South? 

“Oh yes,” Dorian said. “I’ve quite lost my tolerance for attractive fools.”

Quintus shook his head. “It’s a shame you’ll never understand how deeply you’ve betrayed us,” he said. “But Corypheus was not a god, only one man. Tevinter will rise without him-”

Dorian cast Haste.

He had never cast it so quickly, with so little preparation. But it was easy. The bubble of time bloomed out around him, the morning light going golden as honey as it slowed. 

In that golden, silent world, Dorian walked forward. He reached out to the demon, and banished it back across the veil. It struggled, scraping a long claw across his chest, tearing at the cloth of his shirt. For a moment he was standing in the grand foyer of a Minrathous town house, surrounded by marble, and the scent of flowers, and the sight of a seeping pool of blood. Because no one would be able to kill the Bull and make it look like an accident. He was in that moment, the howling screaming emptiness of it; and then he wrestled control of the demon, and sent it back where it had come from. He looked away from the Bull where he lay on the white ground. Looked up at the mage in front of him. Yes, he recognized that face; and around the neck, a silver chain that he knew held a medallion the twin to the one still in Dorian’s pouch.

Dorian stabbed the blade of his staff through the man’s chest.

When the spell wore off, Quintus was on the ground, and Dorian was still stabbing him. Part of him knew Quintus was dead and he really ought to stop because this was not at all civilized behavior, but that part of him was not in control. In the blade stabbed, again and again, and Dorian screamed until the sound didn’t seem like a part of him any more, until his throat was so hoarse it hurt and he stopped, dropped his bloody, gory staff and let it clatter on the ground. He stumbled a few steps away and dropped down to his knees. The air seemed dead silent, filled only by a faint echo of his screaming before it died away. 

“Dorian,” the Bull said. His hand, outstretched on the sand, flopped a little, trying to reach him.

“Fuck you,” Dorian said, and bent himself so his head rested on his thighs, and felt hot tears on his face. 

Intolerable that the Bull might think he was weeping over a waste of air like Quintus, but he couldn’t explain and he couldn’t get control of himself. 

He heard a grunt, and then the sounds of shifting sand, and then there was a big hot hand on his shoulder. “Hey,” the Bull said. 

Dorian pushed the hand off, and lifted his head, though he didn’t turn to look the Bull in the eye. “Stop that,” he said. “Stop moving. Just rest, damn you. _Fasta vass._ What were you thinking?”

A long silence, and then, 

“Guess maybe I wasn’t really thinking.”

“Guess so,” Dorian mimicked back at him in a high, infantile voice, and then, unable to bear anything a moment longer, stood up. His armor was covered in blood. The Bull was on one side of him and the body was on the other. “How badly are you hurt?”

“Just sore,” the Bull said.

Dorian sighed in frustrated anger at the realization that he couldn’t trust this. He turned around. 

The Bull had pulled himself into a sitting position on the sand. There were dark bruises blooming on his chest, and his eyepatch dangled, its strap cut by a sharp blade, but otherwise he did appear unwounded. Something in Dorian’s own chest relaxed, releasing the sharp claws that had been digging into his heart and lungs. But it tensed again when he realized that the Bull was shaking. Like a twanged cord on a mandolin.

“Shit,” someone shouted, and Dorian turned to see Sera, the strung bow in her hands lowering. She had a pack slung over one shoulder, and tossed it to the ground, pulling out bottles that shone red as blood in the sunset. 

“I’m fine,” Dorian said. “It’s not my blood.”

“I’m fine too,” he heard the Bull say. 

_What a matched pair of liars we are._

  
  


Cadash found documents on the corpse containing, Dorian presumed, the information they’d come so far into the wilderness to learn. “Let’s head back tomorrow,” she said. “You two rest now. Sera and I will take all watches.” 

Dorian was too tired and shaken to argue. He walked slowly back through the canyon, following the Bull. Watching the Bull walk slowly, and lean frequently against the rock. Wishing he could offer support, sling the Bull’s arm around his shoulder and stagger along with him like he might do with any other member of the Inquisition. But that was the thing about the Bull, about his size. He was too big to lean on anyone, and, Dorian thought, he was very aware of that, automatically planned to always need to function independently. Tried to hide weakness that no one could help him with. 

Again Dorian cursed himself for a fool.

At the camp the Bull headed for the spring, and Dorian followed. He peeled off his tattered and bloodsoaked shirt, and tried to scrub the blood from his skin as best he could. 

“Dorian,” the Bull said. Dorian turned. The Bull was sitting in the muddy water, knees bent, the water line lapping at his stomach. The bruises on his chest were darkening. He’d either lost the eyepatch or stowed it away somewhere, and it was strange, seeing the mass of scar tissue and the remains of his sightless eye, small and red and lopsided. Strange because they were out in the open, the last glow of sunset gleaming in that sightless cornea, and it was a sight Dorian associated with bedrooms, candlelight and intimacy. 

Dorian remembered the fear the demon had showed him. Wished he couldn’t picture so vividly what that large scarred face would look like with both eyes unseeing. Blood on marble…

“Hey,” the Bull said. He reached out a wet hand, and brushed a thumb over Dorian’s jaw. It took a moment for Dorian to recognize that he was washing away more blood. 

Dorian’s hands felt made of lead. He lifted them. Put them around the Bull’s hand. 

They stayed there in the water like that, while the sun finally slipped below the horizon. 

“We need to get dry or we’ll freeze out here,” Dorian said, finally.

“Yeah,” the Bull agreed. 

Dorian watched the Bull as he stepped out of the water, the stiffness in his motions exaggerated by his proportions. Dorian reached the bag with the linen drying cloths first, and wordlessly offered to dry the Bull off. The Bull nodded, and made a sound of satisfaction as Dorian rubbed the towel along the man’s gigantic shoulders. He’s mortal, Dorian thought. He’s just a man, for all his strength, for all his recklessness. 

“What you did today,” Dorian began, and stopped, seeing the Bull’s back muscles tense. 

“Yeah,” the Bull said, in a quiet rumble. “I fucked up. I’m sorry.”

It occurred to Dorian then that he’d never heard the Bull apologize for something on a mission before. He’d heard apologies in a personal context plenty of times. The Bull was free with them, unnervingly so for someone who was raised to associate apologies with weakness and humiliation. The Bull would cheerfully apologize for eating a pastry Dorian was saving for later, or for getting short-tempered when he’d been cooped up for a while, or for saying the wrong thing in bed, which happened, now and again. 

But Dorian had never heard the Bull apologize for screwing up in a professional sense before, because he’d never seen it happen. The Bull was always improbably, perfectly competent. He anticipated his comrades’ needs before they were even vocalized, shouldered more than his share of any work, and always seemed to make the right call in battle, to a frankly unbelievable degree. 

His apology now sounded… it didn’t sound like him. 

Dorian dried himself off. The air was starting to get seriously cold, but Cadash had built a fire for the first time in days, and the heat of it spread out. She was still sitting by it, but when he caught her eye, she nodded, and stood up, and clambered goatlike up the rock pile towards the distant silhouette of an elf and a bow. 

Dorian took the Bull’s hand in his, and led him to the fire, and sat by it, both of them still naked apart from the cloths wrapped around their waists. He could feel sand sticking the undersides of his thighs, but at the moment he didn’t particularly care. 

“Two years ago in Minrathous,” he said, staring into the fire, “I had a sexual encounter with Quintus Sebronius at a Satinalia party. I didn’t actually know his name at the time. We were wearing masks, and I was drunk, and… and I didn’t care. That was what sex was for me, back then.” The smoke from the fire was making his eyes sting. “Three weeks later, he murdered the husband of a friend of mine, to punish her for her pro-peace stance in the Magisterium. That’s what Tevinter is, right now.” 

He waited. The fire crackled. 

After a long time, the Bull said, “There was this time on Seheron. I don’t remember which year exactly. The vints were attacking the coast. I’d been placed with a group of Antaam, to liase with the Ben-Hassrath. We’d captured a magister, and I was taking him to the capital for interrogation, but the vints really wanted him back. The ashaad I was with all got killed, but I made it into the jungle with the prisoner.” 

Dorian heard the Bull swallow a few times. He squeezed the large hand. 

“There was this village. Maybe fifty people. Some of them knew me. I was pretty well known. Had a reputation. Some of the village elders wanted to turn me away. They were all scared of the Ben-Hassrath, but if I died in the jungle, who would ever know? I probably would have died. I wasn’t doing great. But they pitied me, and gave me shelter. Helped me watch the prisoner.” His voice grew very distant. “You still got that medallion on you?”

Dorian slipped the chain over his head, and handed it to the Bull, who took it gently, and looked at it. 

“When the vints caught up,” he said, quietly, gently, “they burned the village. They killed everyone, even the kids. Didn’t rescue their fucking magister, but I guess they got a medal out of it anyway.” 

The medallion looked tiny in his palm.

It was like with Sera and the dead slaves, Dorian thought. What could he say? Such things happened in war, everyone knew that. Maybe there was something broken in Dorian’s soul that it wasn’t scarred by such things the way Sera’s and the Bull’s were. That the memories that tore him apart were all of Felix, and Gereon, and Maevaris in her wine-red dress. The guilt of personal failure. Perhaps it was because he was Tevene. Perhaps it was because he was his father’s son.

“I didn’t know until five years ago,” the Bull was saying. “I was in Minrathous on a job for the Ben-Hassrath. Part of the job involved being entertainment at a fancy party. There was a guy there who was really eager to tell me about his military career. Didn’t recognize him until he started talking about it, but he’d been one of the magister’s apprentices. He didn’t recognize me. I had to stand there and listen to him talk about it. That was tough.”

“It was Quintus?” Dorian asked.

“Yeah,” the Bull said. He closed his fist around the medallion, and then, in a quick, steady motion, tossed it into the roaring fire, causing a few sparks to fly up into the starry night. The medallion was only silver, Dorian thought. The fire was probably hot enough to melt it into unrecognizability. But it didn’t hurt to make certain, so he sent a burst of mana into the logs, and watched the fire flare green as the logs collapsed into ash.

“I had no idea,” Dorian said.

“No reason you should,” said the Bull. “Thought I could handle it. I guess I was wrong.”

“How you handle it, though, that’s the thing,” Dorian said. “I didn’t realize before. When you’re not doing well, you try to take care of me. Other people, too, but mostly me, yes?” 

Looking at the fire was making his eyes hurt, so he looked at the Bull. He watched the Bull blink, slowly. Watching his long mouth shift. 

Dorian liked to think of himself as the obscure personage in the relationship, the one who kept his true feelings inside, everything covered up with a snide comment and an ironic laugh. And it was easy to think that, because most of the time, the Bull’s moods were as large as he was, impossible to mistake. He laughed loudly and slapped backs and made terrible jokes when he was happy. He got maudlin when he was sad. Irritation was plain to see written in short grunts, snorts, and eye-rolls. 

But there were other, deeper moods, Dorian had learned, which did not telegraph themselves so conveniently. These, he had learned slowly, through struggle, and trial and error. Topics of conversation that would make the Bull melancholy, or afraid. The little pauses, the silences, that meant Dorian’s lover was putting together what he thought Dorian needed to hear. 

The wide white of his eye when he woke from a nightmare in the night, and the way his breathing settled when Dorian put a hand on his scarred chest and assured him that no demon was stalking him in the Fade. 

“I think I’m dry,” Dorian said. “How about you?”

“Yeah,” the Bull said. “I’m good.” 

“Glad to hear it,” Dorian said, and reached over to brush his hand along the Bull’s face. He watched the Bull sigh, eyes fluttering closed, the difference between them a little less visible, closed. Dorian thought perhaps he was starting to understand the appeal of the Bull’s coping mechanisms. The pleasure that could be found in caretaking others.

“Let’s start warming up that tent,” Dorian said. 

Their belongings were still unpacked, inside the tent, the blankets still laid out where Dorian had tossed and turned on them only an hour ago. Dorian plumped up the big pillow, set it against one of the tentpoles, and lounged against it. “Come here,” Dorian said. 

The Bull, crouched low to fit inside the tent, gave him a dubious look. “You wanna be the big spoon?”

“Yes, you great idiot, I want to be the big spoon. Sit down.”

The Bull snorted, but he bent, and laboriously settled himself carefully between Dorian’s knees, grunting a little from some ache or pain. Dorian folded his arms around the Bull’s back and stomach, carefully avoiding that bruised chest. The Bull’s skin was hot from the fire. He seemed both bigger and smaller, captured inside Dorian’s limbs like this. Dorian was starting to see the appeal to this position. 

“Relax,” he whispered, and the Bull leaned back, resting his head against the tent pole, and Dorian tucked his face into the Bull’s shoulder and breathed him in, the smell of smoke and Qunari sweat and dry desert scents. 

“You were stupid today,” Dorian said. “I’m displeased about it.”

“Odd way of showing it,” the Bull said. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining.”

Dorian jabbed him in the stomach with one finger. “Bull.”

“Ouch. Okay. You remember I told you once, I don’t kill ‘vints just for fun? That’s why. If it’s a job, if I’ve got people to look after, I’m good.”

“You’re not,” Dorian said. “You weren’t, today. You could have been killed. Perhaps- and this is just a wild idea to consider- perhaps you might _tell_ people when you’re having difficulty, and let them look after you?”

“Hey,” the Bull said, “I’m okay. We made it. Just like we always do.”

Dorian felt himself tense, felt his arms tighten their grip and his fingernails dig into his own skin. “I need you to fucking be alive when I get back, amatus.”

There was a long, long pause. The Bull’s breathing was very deep, and slow, and seemed very deliberate. Dorian closed his own eyes, and focused on the feeling of the Bull’s stomach rising and falling in time to those measured breaths. 

“You’ve decided,” the Bull said. “You’re going back.”

“If I returned home,” Dorian said, nuzzling against the Bull’s broad neck, “and leveraged all my remaining connections and the weight of my family name, and behaved very respectably, I might be able to get myself onto the commission that awards those stupid medals. I couldn’t stop their production entirely- they’re a major industry back home- but I could cut down on the numbers awarded to child murderers.” 

“Waste of your skills,” the Bull said. One of his hands found its way to Dorian’s right knee, and rested there, warm and heavy. 

“I agree,” Dorian said. “Better to dedicate my efforts to trying to stop the war entirely.” 

“You think you can?”

“I think I have to try.”

Another pause.

“Not forever,” Dorian said, rushing to fill that silence. “Probably not even for long. I couldn’t. I find myself having great difficulty contemplating a life without- oh, don’t make me say it, you know what I mean.”

“Perfectly brewed tea?”

“Yes. That.”

The Bull’s stomach jiggled when he chuckled. 

“I guess I can live with _not long_ ,” he said, and Dorian relaxed. No need to dream tonight of blood on marble. No need to live in fear of learning what Maevaris had felt that morning. 

But the sense he liked to ignore was trying to tell him something. Despite the steady slow rise and fall of the Bull’s stomach, the blood in his veins was telling Dorian that that giant heart was racing.

“Vishante kaffas,” Dorian said, and shifted slightly, leaning to the side and sliding his arms up to the Bull’s shoulders. “Bull, look at me.”

The Bull’s gray eye looked at him. It was wide, and something in it looked lost. 

“I’ll come back,” Dorian said. “You impossible creature. I- I don’t think I could ever leave you.”

He kissed the Bull, a long warm kiss. “Fuck,” he said, afterward. “I have officially lost my wits over you, you intolerable man.”

“Sorry,” the Bull said, and the expression on his face was one that Dorian had never seen from anyone else. “Think it’s mutual, kadan.”

“Andraste’s arse, it’s getting cold,” Dorian said, because big spoon or not, he was absolutely not engaging with that. “You had better not hog the blankets tonight.”

“Hey,” the Bull said. “That demon. Did it get you at all? Make you see shit?”

Dorian scoffed. “Of course not,” he said. “No demon has the nerve to try and enter my mind.” He ran his hand up the Bull’s neck, stroked his face. “Did you see something?”

“Only fake shit,” the Bull said, and kissed Dorian. “I know what’s in the future,” he said. “The two of us, together? We’re unstoppable.”

“You’re absolutely correct,” Dorian said. “There’s nothing to be worried about.” There were tears in his eyes. He felt the Bull wipe them away. 

“Gonna get cold tonight,” the Bull said.

“That’s all right,” Dorian said. “I’ll keep you warm.”

[Essential Comforts by shiokishuji](https://shiokishuji.tumblr.com/post/190269115297/essential-comforts-dragon-age-inquisition-2019#notes)


End file.
